Serbs Suffer, World Doesn’t Care

Life just keeps getting better and better for the peaceable Serbian Orthodox monks and nuns living near the Kosovar Albanians, which came into existence largely because of the United States. Here’s the latest:

Albanians last night completely destroyed the monastery “Assumption of the Virgin” in southern Serbia. Monastery of the Assumption of Virgin” which is located in the vicinity of Vladicin Han was vandalized last night. The door was smashed, and the entire interior were broken. The money from the candle sales and other item inside the monastery is stolen, and all the icons were smashed. Mother Paraskeva (62 years old) confirmed this information. She was very upset fear for her safety. “I’m afraid they will come back, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m here alone and old, but let them come, someone has to defend, “said Paraskeva.

“There’s nothing left, this is terrible! The whole world stood up on his feet because of a cartoon of Muhammad, but when all monasteries and churches destroyed, no one responds,” she added. Asked whether he knows who could have done this, Paraskeva replied that everything is known, but that no one will be interested in this case.

Too bad if you were a Serb victim of any crime in the former Yugoslavia. More Serbs were displaced — ethnically cleansed — by the wars in the Balkans than any other community. And more Serbs remain ethnically displaced to this day. Almost no one has been held to account, and it appears that no one will be.

Altogether, almost all of the West’s friends have been acquitted; almost all of the Serbs have been found guilty. These results do not reflect the balance of crimes committed on the ground.

Harland, a humanitarian activist who lived through the siege of Sarajevo, says he has “no sympathy with the Serbs who have been convicted.” In fact, he testified against Milosevic and Mladic in their war crimes trials. But what’s going on now is not justice, no how, no way. More:

The Croatian leaders connived in the carve-up of Yugoslavia, and contributed mightily to the horrors on Bosnia and Herzegovina. I witnessed for myself the indiscriminate fury of the Croatian assault on the beautiful city of Mostar. I lived in a town in Bosnia where the decapitated heads of captured Muslims were displayed in the marketplace.

I saw for myself tens and tens of thousands of Serb civilian refugees fleeing Croatia in the wake of the 1995 Croatian offensive that ended the war. If the acquitted generals were not responsible for this ethnic cleansing, then somebody was, somebody who will presumably go free.

Nor were the Serbs and Croats alone, though they must shoulder most of the judgment of history. The Bosnian Muslim leadership had deeply compromising links to the international jihahist movement, and hosted at least three people who went on to play key roles in the 9/11 attacks on the United States. I witnessed attacks by foreign mujahedeen elements against Croat civilians in the Lasva Valley.

And the Kosovar Albanian authorities deserve a special mention, having taken ethnic cleansing to its most extreme form — ridding themselves almost entirely of the Serb and Roma populations. Kosovo’s ancient Christian Orthodox monasteries are now almost the only reminder of a once-flourishing non-Albanian population. (These monasteries have been the object of numerous violent attacks. Several have been destroyed; others remain under threat.)

Hundreds of thousands of Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo by the Kosovar Albanians, Harland points out.

The UN case against the Croatian generals was incredibly flimsy and was simply an attempt by Carla Del Ponte and others to engage in equalization of guilt across the parties involved.

The case rested on whether there was indiscriminate shelling conducted by Croatian Armed Forces (HV) against non-military Serbian targets. The prosecution came up with a 200 meter rule in which they claimed that any shells that fell outside of the 200 meter range were ‘indiscriminate’.

Whoopsy-daisy!

The problem here is that no one could justify the choice of 200 meters as a rule. The even bigger problem is that if this rule was applied across the board, American and British generals in Iraq and Afghanistan would have to be brought before The Hague.

Why?

Well, as American and British generals pointed out, the HV had a greater rate of accuracy in 1995 during this operation than both the Americans and British had during Iraq and Afghanistan, while using older technology.

This would have set a nasty precedent in international law going forward.

Add that to the fact (as shown during the trial) that the rebel Serb administration ordered its own people to evacuate, and the case collapsed.

The Serbs did get cheated in Kosovo, but Croatia is entirely a different matter and the charade at The Hague could no longer be kept up in this matter.

Other people suffer and no one cares. Why should we care about the suffering of Serbs or anyone else?

Can you explain?

Thanks in advance!

P.S. Smart folks know it’s a cold, cruel world out there. When the rubber hits the road, you’re on your own. Be prepared or accept your fate as roadkill. It’s not pretty, but that’s the way it is, so keep your head up!

You tell me. That’s a hard one for me to figure out, Rod, and I have often wondered what was going on. Why kick the Slavs in the face when they’re down? What’s the point?

And there seems to be some double standards operating. For example, it was okay if NATO decided to diddle around and carve off Kosovo from Serbia, and we proceeded to bomb the Serbs into submission. Yet somehow it’s not okay for Russia to diddle in South Ossetia.

To seriously challenge and end the vile current situation described in this article would require, in my opinion, a reconciliation either between Croatia and Serbia or between Romania and Russia. Both advantageous reconciliations are possible even to a pessimist like me, but the NATO-plutocratic elites that brought about this situation in the first place stand in the way of both. The nationalisms in Eastern Europe that could seriously pose a threat to this status quo instead waste too much time and energy hating each other.

Part of the problem is that the Serbs are horrible at PR – they’re very good at presenting their worst sides to the international community. I’m not trying to be cheap or harsh here, but simply honest – again, the Serbs are really bad at presenting a sympathetic image of themselves. Probably the biggest symptom of this is the unwillingness of Serbs – in general – to acknowledge their own responsibility for the horrors certain of their nationals perpetrated during the 1990s. Serbs will talk all day long about Islamic fundamentalism and Croatian fascism (which is right and proper by the way – as Rod pointed out, these topics are often neglected by the MSM), but the number of Serbs who face the crimes their own people commited are very much a minority (a very brave and honorable minority, I should stress). Unfairly but unsuprisingly, innocent Serbs are now paying the price for that.

Um, we should remember that the Serbs– or more properly, the barely ex-Communist thugocrats ruling them– started the whole mess in the first place by trying to drive the Albanians out (AKA ethic cleansing). Its not as if the US just showed up one day out of the blue and announced that Kosovo was being given to the Albanians.
As for the Croats they are also Slavs.

Usually I can understand the logic of our mistakes, however warped and despite my disagreement, but in this case I have no idea. What were we thinking?

We were thinking: Serb = Nazi, Bosnian/Albanian Muslim = Jew. The rhetoric at the time was explicit on this point.

A necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, condition to steering our Republic out of its imperial foreign policy madness is for white gentile Americans to stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and to stop viewing almost every foreign policy conflict through the prism of the Holocaust. (Side-note: non-white gentiles already feel no guilt over the Holocaust.) The vicious myth — libel, really — that the United States somehow failed to overthrow Hitler early or prevent his mass murders in the 1930s (which presupposes that the US had such an obligation in the first place), said failure attributable to devilish white Christian anti-Semitic “isolationists”, is used by neoconservatives and liberal hawks alike to manipulate the American public’s emotions and justify one costly and counterproductive intervention after another.

With the former Yugoslavia specifically there was also this foolish notion that the world’s Muslims would be grateful for the American intervention, ceasing to hate the Great Satan for its other policies (which our leaders had no intention of changing). The gratitude that we ended up getting was the Fort Dix terrorist plot, hatched by a bunch of refugees from Kosovo rescued as children during Clinton’s humanitarian crusade.

As much as I care about this part of the world for personal reasons, there’s an exhaustion that sets in amongst people, like when your many children are being so bad for so long, and you just start laying down the law and punishments without caring any longer about who started what or who is even right or wrong, because of how they have shown their utter inability to conduct themselves successfully and you simply need to establish peace.

But what it also makes me consider is so many historical accounts through centuries (and I am no expert on thing like this) where populations of people were moved by leaders in mass and exiles, in order to not have these situations where people won’t get along in one geographical place and continue to wreck the land and destroy themselves. But in the modern world we just take decades and more trying to work it out, or we wall some of them into a ghetto, or we let a few trickle through into somewhere as refugees, if they want, and eventually the passions die off with the generations.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but I believe that the Serbian Orthodox Church was strongly nationalist and basically supportive of Milosevic and his attempt to keep most of the land in the former Yugoslavia for Serbia. I think the church also supported Karadzic. It’s not particularly surprising that Kosovars don’t feel warmly about the Serbian Orthodox. I don’t fully understand what you would have wanted the US to do a decade or so ago? Permit the ethnic cleansing — which was mainly started by the Serbs — to continue?

Excellent post and comment by the insightful Mr. Dreher. The Serbs have survived previous grim times with the Turks, the Nazis and the Commies and it looks like they are going to outlast the waning US/EU. In “Bosnia” there is now a de facto independent Republika Srpska and the Bosnian Croats now co-operate with the Serbs against outside calls for centralization with the favored Moslems. Kosovo may never come entirely back but against US wishes it is effectively partitioned. Last year the failed pro-Western government in Belgrade was dumped by disillusioned voters and relations with Russia have dramatically improved. Serbia is one of the few countries in the world where I’ve read students are demanding more Russian language courses. Anyway, the alliances and tensions in the Balkans are reminiscent of one hundred years ago…1913… due in part to our bloody meddling. The more things change. Bombing the Serbs may have saved them from the annihilation of assimilation.

Excellent points, Noah172, and I should add that the Holocaust guilt culture is, along with messianic democratism, one of the main ideologies that I think would be challenged by either the reconciliations/alliances I propose in my post above.

Serbs are almost universally hated by ther neighbours, probably (and strangely) more that Bosniaks and Albanians who are basically Muslim minorities and Ottoman leftovers in a region that is overwhelmingly Christian. And here is why: due to their extreme (and I mean extreme) nationalism, in which religion is only instrumentalized as a crucial part of the national identity (very small percentage of Serbs are practicing Orthodox Christians), they’ve tried to pick a fight with every one of them for one reason or another. Here’s a short list: according to Serb nationalists, Croats are in fact renegade Serbs, and Croat language is actually and originally Serb language, and large parts of Croatia should belong to Serbs and they should have the right to join those parts with Serbia; Bosniaks are also renegade Serbs, traitors who betrayed their ancestral Christian religion and nation, Turkish servants, Bosnian language is actually and originally Serb language, and Bosnia should be a part of Serbia; Montenegrins (who are also Orthodox Christians), are also Serbs, their language is also Serb language falsly called Montenegrin, and such things as a Montenegrin Orthodox Church should not exist; Macedonians (also Orthodox) are also Serbs (southern Serbs to be exact) and there should be no such thing as a Macedonian Orthodox Church; Vojvodina (a Serbian province with a large Hungarian population) should be stripped of its autonomy as much as possible; Bulgarians are backstabbing traitors, etc. As you can see , the entire region of the former Yugoslavia is basically Serb territory by this theory, and most of it’s population are Serbs whose inner national self needs to be reawakened. No wonder it fell apart.

Of course, not all Serbs are nationalists, and I’m not trying to justify the attacks against monks or any innocent person ; my point is that Serbs have generally shown little remorse for everything they’ve done during the 90′s (their current president is a Chetnik Duke; Chetniks are Serb nationalist movement which had it’s paramilitary wing during the 90′s conflicts, and which was responsible for many atrocities committed accross former Yugoslavia), and are keeping some of their old ambitions alive (especially with regards to parts of Bosnia). Those who are not nationalists aren’t very loud in denouncing that which has been done in their name, perhaps out of fear of being marked as traitors or something like that.

So the current attitude of surrounding nations to Serbia is that of enormous mistrust, and they’re probably doing they’re part in informing the international opinion on Serbs. Plus, Serbs have never hidden their sympathies and desire to be, to some extent, under Russian patronage and sphere of influence, which is also a minus for them in Western eyes, and probably one of the main reasons the West supported Muslim Bosniaks and Albanians agaist them.

Hey, I’m not going to defend Serbian behavior during the war. I’ll never forget a US soldier friend who served in the peacekeeping mission there talking about going into a wooden warehouse where thousands of Muslim prisoners had been mass murdered by Serbs. He spoke of the black mold on the walls, living off the blood and bodily fluids of the murdered Bosniaks. Nightmarish.

And of course the whole idea of “they did it to us first” when applied to the Balkans gets you down the rabbit hole. Read “Black Lamb And Grey Falcon” to see that this isn’t anything new.

I just find it reprehensible that the world despises Serbs when they desecrate Muslim holy places — don’t get me wrong, the world should despise those who do such things! — but says ho-hum when Kosovar Muslims do the same to monasteries. What did that old nun do to those villains?

Although really Rod, when is the last time the world cared in general what happens to holy places?

There was plenty of hand-wringing whenever a “Islamic holy place” was somehow involved in a battle or exchange of fire in Iraq, but that was only a convenient club to beat Americans over the head with. Once the US was out, eh…

When the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas there were complaints, but enough to do anything about it? Nope.

Palestinian gunmen lock themselves into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and take hostages, rigging the place with bombs, and eh…

The world only really cares about Holy Places when it fits a political cause.

Well actually, they are one language, albeit written in two different alphabets with some dialectal variants. One might as well divide American English into Yankee and Y’all.

Macedonian by the way is certainly not Serbian: it’s basically a form of Bulgarian, and a direct descendant of Old Slavonic.

Roger, Patriarch Pavel did condemn ethnic cleansing in no uncertain terms, though not until American bombs were raining down on Belgrade.
Though to be sure nationalism is not lacking in Serbian Orthodoxy. In this country I once attended a pan-Orthodox vesper service hosted by a Serbian Orthodox Church. At the end the priest went off on a diatribe about how a Serbian monastery had just been destroyed in the Old Country and the American media had taken no note of it. After the service I mentioned to the priest that I had read a story about that act in the St Pete Times that very day. He got very angry with me and with a wild-eyed look launched into a tirade about how we Americans were a stupid people who did not appreciate the greatness of Serbia. Momentarily I thought he was going to cuss me out!

“Slavs” don’t hate America. Most Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians, Croats, Western Ukrainians–the “Western” Slavs–are quite pro-American. And even many of the Eastern Slavs–Bulgarians, Macedonians, Eastern Ukrainians–are quite friendly to the US. Even the supposedly hostile Eastern Slavs–Russians, Serbs–aren’t particularly hostile, if you exclude the nationalists.

You Americans should stop worrying that everyone hates you; that sort of paranoia seems to be encouraged by an American media that likes to exaggerate American sins and ignore the sins of other superpowers.

As far as Serb refugees are concerned, there are refugees all over the former Yugoslavia, Serbs are hardly unique in this regard. I frequently go to Croatia, and most of the Croats and Bosnians I meet there seem to come from families that fled one part of ex-Yugoslavia or other. They’ve settled in Croatia and aren’t planning to go back. On the other hand, I did meet quite a few Serbs in Croatia, which was a surprise; Serbs have returned, and some never left; they’re probably not in the majority, but they’re not insignificant in numbers, either. The current government in Croatia got more votes from Serbs living in Croatia than did Serb parties in the Croatian parliament.

Interestingly enough, Jovan Pavlovic, the Mitropolit of the Serb Orthodox Church of Zagreb, has just made a public statement of solidarity with one of the freed generals, Ante Gotovina, who recently spoke to the Serbian media and urged all Serbs who have not yet returned to Croatia to do so. As niccolo and donkey noted above, the charges against the Croat generals were very dubious from the beginning, and based on standards of what constitutes acceptable shelling that are not followed by any military.

There’s no doubt that Kosovo has been taken from the Serbs, and that it is not easy to be a Serb in majority Albanian areas of Kosovo. However, the Serbs are also making things very difficult for themselves by essentially waging a quiet war of harrassment against the EU administration in Kosovo (EULEX). They want to separate the northern part of Kosovo, where the Serbs are a majority, from the rest and they hope that maintaining instability will help them accomplish that; hence the blockades, shooting at EU officials, and other acts of sabotage and hostility. On the other hand, the last thing the UN and EU want to deal with at the moment is more border changes.

The Serbs were given the Bosnian Serb Republic–a sizable chunk of property–and they haven’t been placed under any significant pressure to allow the hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs to return to those areas; the US and Europe aren’t willing to give them any more, especially not in response to belligerent acts.

The Russians keep teasing the Serbs with grandiose proclamations of Orthodox/Slavic brotherhood, and other such nonsense, but they haven’t really done anything for the Serbs other than to encourage them in their belligerence.

When I say “the Serbs” I don’t mean all or even a majority of them, of course. The Serbs who vacation in Croatia during the summer, for example, are very pro-European, and quite skeptical of Russia and of Serb nationalism; however, they don’t have much political clout. Their representative was Boris Tadic who, unfortunately, turned out to be incompetent and corrupt.

Serbian and Croatian are mutually comprehensible languages with separate, parallel histories and distinct standards. It’s not unlike the relationship between the Scandinavian languages. A Norwegian who lives in the south is more likely to understand Danish than some Norwegian dialects, but he still speaks Norwegian rather than Danish. Mutual comprehensibility between languages doesn’t render them identical–e.g. Czech and Slovak, and Macedonian and Bulgarian.

THe Yugoslav government tried to concoct a “Serbo-Croatian” language but it didn’t work. Serbs and Croats retained their distinct standards. Eventually, by the early 80′s even the Communist Yugoslav state was forced to admit that there two distinct linguistic entities–”Croato-Serbian” and “Serbo-Croatian”–though they continued to insist that they were part of one language (“Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian” if you can believe it); if that sounds like an admission of defeat, it was.

I’ve done a search of a few of the major Serb papers online–b92.net, blic.rs, novosti.rs and kurir.rs–and the only mention of the incident in Vladicin Han was on kurir.rs, which reports that unknown vandals damaged every icon except that of John the Baptist, and that something similar occurred in the Church of the village of Prekodolce. Do Albanian Muslims venerate St. John the Baptist? Kurir.rs is quite nationalist, yet even they do not identify the perpetrators as Albanians.

I think commenter K is right concerning exhaustion. After decades of watching a seemingly endless cycle of ethnic violence in that part of the world (based upon grudges nursed for hundreds of years), most Americans have thrown up their hands and said “To heck with ‘em!” That attitude may be simplistic and unfair. But it’s understandable.

“I just find it reprehensible that the world despises Serbs when they desecrate Muslim holy places — don’t get me wrong, the world should despise those who do such things! — but says ho-hum when Kosovar Muslims do the same to monasteries. What did that old nun do to those villains?”
————————-

But this is nothing new. The time is long past that Christianity and the Christian sacrament with its institution are viewed kindly, let alone as holy, by the media and by the world. Hardly any in the MSM are Christian — even if they grew up in what was left over of a Christian world. The media like to root for the underdog, and it’s widely viewed that the Muslim has been the underdog for many years, repressed and oppressed by the western, white Christian. The MSM don’t care about any specifics of faith differences between Christianity or Islam — to them, it’s all the same faith, worshipping God, and differences in faith are issues over which stupid people in history have decided to fight wars.

So I think that the MSM will continue to root for the underdog (i.e., the Muslim), until he is no longer an underdog. At that time, and probably only at that time, they may begin to understand that their life in the remnants of a Christian society was much preferable to life in an Islamic society. Until then, we will continue to hear mass outrage anytime anything having to do with Islam is insulted, but complete silence if an ancient Christian monastery or if a Christian church is destroyed, or if a priest is murdered. After all, the Christian is the oppressor, and he probably deserves it.

“So I think that the MSM will continue to root for the underdog (i.e., the Muslim), until he is no longer an underdog. At that time, and probably only at that time, they may begin to understand that their life in the remnants of a Christian society was much preferable to life in an Islamic society.”

I agree with this somewhat, however I think the anti-Christian sentiment will actually carry over for some time (in the coming decades) and continue into the rise of Islamic majority in Europe and North America. I think also there are anti-religious “liberals” who value order, who have no problem with sacrificing various freedoms to a big or strong government, and will be very peaceful if Islam in population and governing continues ascendance.
We in the West may object to a lot of the legal and daily life in a place like Saudi Arabia or similar countries, but honestly the order, safety, low crime, value and protection of morality, etc may make Islamic systems (or adopting aspects of) look better and better.

Perhaps it has fallen to the Serbian monks to atone, through their suffering, for the sins of their compatriots who persecuted the Albanian Kosovars and attempted “ethnic cleansing” of the region over the previous 100 years? If they are truly Christian and not just Serb nationalists in religious garb, they might consider this aspect of what is happening.

I think commenter K is right concerning exhaustion. After decades of watching a seemingly endless cycle of ethnic violence in that part of the world (based upon grudges nursed for hundreds of years), most Americans have thrown up their hands and said “To heck with ‘em!” That attitude may be simplistic and unfair. But it’s understandable.

“The great rule of conduct for us, [the United States] in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”

While granting there may be a specific bias against the Serbs, I wonder if this isn’t also part of a general indifference on the part of the Western media and Western elites to persecution of Christians in general. How much do we really hear about persecution of Christians in China? In the Middle East? On the Indian subcontinent? In Sub-Saharan Africa? Sure, there is the occasional hand-wringing about the the plight of the Copts in Egypt and an occasional story about the flight of Iraqi Christians from their homeland; but let one idiot threaten to burn a Koran or draw a cartoon of Mohammed, and the Western media practically pee their collective pants in their breathless rush to cover it. I think that in general the Western media and elites are too invested in the narrative of Christians as historical oppressors to be able to comprehend the notion of Christians as victims — esp. as victims of Muslims, whom the Western elite narrative has, in many cases, cast as victims of Western colonialism, imperialism, racism, etc. After all, you can’t be both a victim and an oppressor, can you? (See also: Black people can’t be racist; Women can’t be sexist.)

In the five years I lived in Russia I think I ran into exactly once incident of anti-Americanism and that guy was pretty drunk. I’m not sure that many slavs hate America so much as they regard us (and they may be right) as deeply misguided.

The USA is deeply protestant and I suspect that many Americans suspect that when Catholics or Orthodox Christians suffer they must have had it coming. (See Roger and Anthony for example)

WWI was started partly by England and Russia’s belligerent alliance against Germany, and partly by Wilhelm II’s stupid insistence on defending the decaying, unmanageable Austro-Hungarian Empire when he should have been working on repairing relations with Russia. But it wasn’t the war itself (bloody and pointless as it was) that ruined Western Civilization so much as the way the war concluded, as the logic of needing to “punish” another Western nation for the “crime” of going to war as if that nation were the vanguished in a civil war or a colonial war. But even if one does not buy into the myth of sole or even primary German guilt for the war, blaming the Serbs for starting the war is inaccurate.

Anyway, this is the past, and both sides of the Great War have paid dearly for their stupidity. What matters is the sorry state the West is in now. There is no point in re-fighting dumb, fratricidal wars.

“Perhaps it has fallen to the Serbian monks to atone, through their suffering, for the sins of their compatriots who persecuted the Albanian Kosovars and attempted “ethnic cleansing” of the region over the previous 100 years?”

If you read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, you’ll see that Rebecca West considered the influx of Serbs into Kosovo as developing a backward area. As it stands, there area was cleansed of Serbs way back in the late 17th century — there is a reason there are so many Orthodox shrines in the area, and so many place names are Slavic — Slavic Orthodox people were their first.

Even in modern times, there was a much larger proportion of Serbs in Kosovo than presently. Illegal immigration from Albania during the Tito/Yugoslav times (Yugoslavia was a paradise compared to Hohxa’s Albania) , and a higher birthrate among the Albanian population, led to so-called ‘Kosovars’ becoming the overwhelming majority in the area. It also helped that the Albanians controlled the local communist party, and their thugs regularly attack Serbs. When Milosevic got on TV in 1989 to declare to Serbs in Kosovo ‘you will never be beaten again’, he was responding to real attacks by Albanians upon Serbs.

“The Serbs brought us the First World War, the war that was the beginning of the end of Western Civilization.”

Blame Austria-Hungary for annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“THe Yugoslav government tried to concoct a “Serbo-Croatian” language but it didn’t work. Serbs and Croats retained their distinct standards. ”

But Standard Croatian is based on a ‘dialect’ which is shared by all three religious groups, and which was standardized by a Serb (Vuk Karadjic). ‘Croatian’ is a political construction. If Croats really wanted to distinguish themselves from Serbs linguistically they would adopt Kajkavski (a dialect spoke in the Zagreb hinterland which is really spoken only by people identifying as Croats) as standard.

Fact is that ‘Croatian’ and ‘Serbian’ aren’t much father apart than British and American English.

“gave them the Republika Srpska’ . No, the Bosnian Serbs fought for that … and indeed controlled far more land than the RS, until we started bombing them, thus saving the Muslims bacon (so to speak). As it is, the EU etc have been trying to weaken the RS, dissolve it into Bosnia, since the war ended.

You’re just about the most thought-provoking and perceptive writer on the web’s most stimulating website, but just how much do you know about the website hosting this report? Who runs it? Who funds it? Who are the journalists working there? What are their editorial standards? Have they ever published reports “against interest” or is it always Serbs as innocent victims/provoked beyond reason/no worse than anyone else/victimized by evil conspirators?

Secondly, you’re saying
“I just find it reprehensible that the world despises Serbs
when they desecrate Muslim holy places — don’t get me
wrong, the world should despise those who do such
things! — but says ho-hum when Kosovar Muslims do
the same to monasteries. What did that old nun do to
those villains?

The world says ho-hum to desecration of Serb holy places just like it said ho-hum to the gruesome atrocities committed against German civilians between 1944-46, and for the exact same reasons.
Serbs wanted all of Yugoslavia as a centralized, unitary state run from Belgrade which they would dominate. When the other nationalities objected to having their autonomy taken away, the Serbs launched a series of wars in which ethnic cleansing was not merely a military tactic, but the entire purpose of each war. In fact the term “ethnic cleansing” was developed – by the Serbian Academy of Sciences – in the late 80s to describe, and advocate for, just such a policy. Journalists who follow the Balkans just don’t care what happens to them any more,

Thirdly, as Joshua pointed out, Serbs are horrible at PR. They can’t even get the simplest facts right when they’re putting out their “side” of the story. Check the last paragraph of the article;
>invented lies by the Albanians. “They started all these
>stories and even payed the people to lie about it. Some
>have been given 35 000 DM (Deutsche Marks) to
>create a bad image of the Bishop.
The Deutsche Mark disappeared 10 years ago, replaced by the Euro. What other parts of the story are – at best – inaccurate?

Having spent 6 years in the region (Hungary) in the lead up to and during the war, I’ve some familiarity with Serb stories of atrocities against them, and this one fits the usual pattern; lurid, filled with pathetic mistakes (like the 35k DM), riddled with paranoia, uncorroborated and reported nowhere else. As Ivan K pointed out, it’s only been reported in one other site which has its own history as a propaganda outlet. If this incident had happened, or had happened in the way it’s reported, the Serb media would be all over it like a rash.

Finally, over the decades Serbs have acquired an unenviable reputation among Balkans experts for what can can only be described as an unusually elastic approach to the truth. Their President from 1992-93, Dobrica Cosic, a distinguished novelist, expressed this propensity eloquently:
“We lie to deceive ourselves, to console others, we lie for
mercy, we lie to fight fear, to encourage ourselves, to
hide our and somebody else’s misery. We lie for love
and honesty. We lie because of freedom. Lying is a trait
of our patriotism and the proof of our innate
intelligence. We lie creatively, imaginatively and
inventively.”

I’m not saying for certain that this story is made up. I am saying that anyone dealing with the Balkans needs to take stories from any side against another with several grains of salt. In the case of Serb-generated atrocity stories they need to take them with several spadefulls.

Sadly, what I’ve written above applies *at least* as much to the Serbian Orthodox church as it does to Serbian society in general.

I clearly recall an Economist article on the attitudes of Serbs in Kosovo during the start of the clampdown in 1988-89. A mother Tatiana (IIRC) of a Serb nunnery accused a – Kosovar – policeman of raping, her in a lift to the Economist’s correspondent. Closer questioning of Mother Tatiana by the correspondent revealed that he had touched her hand.

“an occasional story about the flight of Iraqi Christians from their homeland; but let one idiot threaten to burn a Koran or draw a cartoon of Mohammed, and the Western media practically pee their collective pants in their breathless rush to cover it.”

I felt that the MSM point of view for these stories was that Muslims tended to react with unnecessry violence over minor meaningless causes.

Ivan K, linguists who look at the linguistic evidence and do not have political axes to grind have always classed them as one language, Serbocroatian. That was true long before Yugoslavia came into being and when the Serbs and Croats were under separate governments.
I agree these definitions are always to some extent influenced by politics. The Scandinavian example you give shows as much. And on the opposite side of the argument, English and Scots English probably should be seen as distinct languages, and maybe will be if Scotland splits from the UK. (And you can make a case that there’s really more than one Italian language– Sicilian and Venetian are pretty far apart) But Dutch and Flemish are now acknowledged as one language and, as far as I know, no one is campaigning for a language called “Montenegrian” to be recognized as distinct from Serbian, or for a Moldovan language distinct from Romanian.

VikingLS wrote “The USA is deeply protestant and I suspect that many Americans suspect that when Catholics or Orthodox Christians suffer they must have had it coming.”

I don’t think the U.S. is anti-Catholic anymore but NATO is systematically hostile to Eastern Orthodoxy, and the media does NATO’s bidding in these matters. That’s why atrocities against the Serbs are underreported and you never hear the Serbian side of the story in these conflicts.

JohnF: “Ivan K, linguists who look at the linguistic evidence and do not have political axes to grind have always classed them as one language, Serbocroatian. That was true long before Yugoslavia came into being and when the Serbs and Croats were under separate governments.”

That’s not correct. Vuk Karadzic called everything spoken in Serbia, Bosnia, and much of Croatia “Serbian”, his theory being that everyone who spoke a stokavian-ijekavian variant was really a Serb. That dubious idea was one of the arguments for the Serb claim to all of Bosnia and most of Croatia.

Croats, on the other hand, used a variety of names for their language, “Illyrian” being a common one. The title of first Croatian grammar, written by the Jesuit Bartol Kasic, and published in Rome in 1604 is “Institutionum linguae illyricae”. The very bureaucratic “Serbo-Croatian” wasn’t in common use until the 20th century. No Serbian or Croatian literary figure used this term to describe their language until well into the 20th century.

Even in Communist Yugoslavia it was common to “translate” from one standard into another. If a Belgrade newspaper reported words spoken in Croatian, they would always be reported in Serbian (even when written in Latin script) and vice-versa.

You claim that politics is involved in the denial of the existence of Serbo-Croatian; actually the opposite is true. Serbo-Croatian was the state-sponsored project. The existence of distinct standards was and is simply a fact. Again, why was even the state compelled to come up with two categories–”Serbo-Croatian” vs. “Croato-Serbian”–for the two standards?

The paradoxes of mutually comprehensible standards aren’t unique to Serbian and Croatian; what is unique to Serbian and Croatian is a history of political involvement. Scandinavians just accepted the idea of three distinct standards–Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish; so did the Slovaks and Czechs. In both of these cases it was theoretically possible to concoct a common standard and impose it on everyone; fortunately, that didn’t happen.

MYoung says: ” If Croats really wanted to distinguish themselves from Serbs linguistically they would adopt Kajkavski (a dialect spoke in the Zagreb hinterland which is really spoken only by people identifying as Croats) as standard.”

THis is the standard Serb nationalist claim, which has no basis in historical fact. Kajkavian is a dialect of Croatian, to be sure, but it’s not the only one, and it was never a contender for the role of a Croatian standard. The only alternative to sto/ije-kavian was ca/i-kavian; in fact, that was a de facto standard in Zadar, Split, Trogir, Hvar, Dubrovnik in the 16th and 17th centuries. For example, Hektorovic’s Ribanje i Ribarsko Prigovaranje already shows evidence of an attempt to come up with a standard to be used by Croatian authors in Dubrovnik and the Venetian terrotories. Incidentally, when Hektorovic was ill, Nikola Naljeskovic, Hektorovic’s Ragusan literary fellow wrote “Molim te togaj rad, nemoj svi Hrvati da na te plaču sad hotjej ga parjati”; this is a typical example of the use of “Hrvati” (“Croats”) to refer to the people, and it was occasionally used to refer to the language.

Again, none of this complexity is unique to Serbian and Croatian. When Beowulf, a Geat (today a Swede) offers his help to Hrothgar, a Dane, they understand each other, but they also understand that one is a Geat and the other a Dane; and today’s Swedes and Danes understand that one is a Swede and the other a Dane, and that they probably spoke languages that were similar but not identical. Of course, Beowulf was written in Old English, but that’s a separate issue.

“But Dutch and Flemish are now acknowledged as one language and, as far as I know, no one is campaigning for a language called “Montenegrian” to be recognized as distinct from Serbian, or for a Moldovan language distinct from Romanian.”

The difference between two mutually comprehensible languages and two dialects of one language is socio-linguistic rather than political. If authors, poets, educators, etc. from two groups behave as if there is one standard–if they use the same vocabularies, grammars, etc.–then there is one language. If they use and have always used distinct standards, then you have two languages. When a state attempts to use its coercive powers to merge or separate standards in a way that is contrary to socio-linguistic facts, that is politics.

Kosovo is the heartland of Serbian Christian Orthodoxy, and really it should be deemed vital to all Orthodox Christians. In fact, Western Europe owes immense gratitude to the Serbian army and martyrs for preventing a further Ottoman advance into the West, read the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389.

Serbia was a sacrificial lamb on Europe’s altar. And despite centuries of Ottoman occupation, the people remained loyal to God and their Orthodox faith. And the Left despises that. They are all but happy to turn portions of Europe over to the jihadists.

(Sadly, some Serbian leaders committed horrifying crimes against humanity in the name of Serbia; they will go to Hell, if they have not died already).

Ben, the Ottomans advanced well beyond Kosovo: they made it all the way to gates of Vienna after all.
And really: Orthodoxy is not a place. It is a faith. If I were going to suggest fighting over a place, Constantinople, Antioch and Jerusalem– even Alexandria– would have prior claim. But it is not a place that sanctifies, but rather the living God who is everywhere.
And do remember that the Ottomans also conquered the Greeks, the Georgians, the Armenians (who paid a truly horrific price), the Bulgarians, the Romanians, the Croats, the Albanians, and the Hungarians. The Serbs had a lot of company under the Ottoman yoke– they have no special claim to victimhood status. And in any event Christians ought not be slaves to past, but enlightened by hope for the future in Christ.

Sadly, some Serbian leaders committed horrifying crimes against humanity in the name of Serbia **with the enthusiastic support of the Serb people**; they will go to Hell, if they have not died already).

“…as far as I know, no one is campaigning for a language called “Montenegrian” to be recognized as distinct from Serbian, or for a Moldovan language distinct from Romanian.”

Actually, Montenegrin is recognized by the constitution of Montenegro as one of its official languages, and two letters (“soft š” and “soft ž”) have been recently added to it that previously were present only in the spoken language (while the language was a part of “Serbo-Croatian”, these were considered incorrect forms of existing letters of that language).

I am reminded of the 1990s cartoon showing a shadowy figure behind a machine gun emplacement, telling a widow and two children huddled nearby, “Communism was very bad. If it wasn’t for communism, we could have been doing this years ago.”

Of course, the key weakness of communism was precisely that it was so centralized and top-down, a change of leadership from an internationalist to a nationalist could transform the entire organization at the stroke of a pen. There is a significant difference between international socialism and national socialism. Watching Slobodan Milosevich transform an international socialist league to a national socialist party was one of the key events in convincing me communism was fatally flawed.

But, as alluded to above, Milosevich was in part responding to the fact that Kosovars in the autonomous region they occupied had been raping Serbian girls as part sport and part political protest for years, with sundry other harassment of the ethnically Serbian population. So the Kosovars were molesting the Serbs who oppressed the Kosovars who in the name of liberation harassed the Serbs…

It was a bad situation for the U.S. or the U.N. to get involved in. The fact that Tito couldn’t put together a multi-ethnic or trans-ethnic state in a manner that would survive his own passage from the scene fatally weakens his own legacy. Still, I prefer a government that ruthlessly suppresses ethnic chauvinism of all varieties, to one that promotes any one variety, or even all varieties. It was not uncommon for children swept up in the climate to tell their mothers “I will kill the Serbs for you, mommy,” when mommy knew that the boy’s own grandfather was a Serb. Tito, incidentally, was a Croat, and the Serb nationalists in part brought this on themselves by trying to reassert Serbia’s traditional domination of the “south Slav” union.

BTW, for anyone who is still interested in this thread, Christianity is not exactly unknown among Albanians. Consensus estimates are that about 30% of them are Christians, with Catholicism predominant among those northern Albanians who profess Christianity and Orthodoxy predominant in the South.

In Kosovo at least there has been a statistically small but socially noticeable trend of Kosovars openly converting to Christianity in recent years. Given the despicably servile relationship between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Serbian state and its associated thug warlords, as well as the open and unquestioning support for Serbs from the Greek-dominated world of Orthodoxy, it will hardly surprise anyone to hear that Catholicism is picking up most of these with evangelicals picking up the rest. Orthodoxy, being tainted by Serbian associations, doesn’t get a look in.

Milosevic unleashed a horrible policy of encouraging a rabid expansive campaign of brutal expansion of the Serbain state at all costs. He unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Serbia, followed by an even more brutal campaign in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The West finally got its act together when he tried the same thing in Kosovo.

It is hard to muster much sympathy for the Serbs when they harbored wanted criminals like Mladic and Karadzic for years.

It is hard to muster much sympathy for the Serbian people for putting up with this crap from their leaders for years. It is a little bit like the German people who claimed that Hitler was forced on them and that there was hardly one single Nazi in postwar Germany.

The Serbian Church and its leadership did almost nothing visible to stand against Milosevic when he unleashed this Terror.

I think somebody mentioned the Russian Orthodox Church here. They were largely responsible for torpedoing Pope John Paul II’s efforts to visit Russia – something about being against “proselytizing”. Why is the ROC afraid of the Catholic Church?